America's oldest war criminal

Today millions of Americans will pause from their barbecues and family gatherings to remember the American heroes who fought and died in the service of their country. This is altogether fitting, for even when the cause has not been just, they served, and risked all, on our behalf.

By coincidence, today is also the ninetieth birthday of a man who least deserves another day, not to speak of another year, of life. Unlike our fallen heroes, the life of Henry Kissinger is marked not by sacrifice but by self-aggrandizement, not by devotion to our founding ideals, but by their utter rejection.

Whether we speak of his direction of unrestrained bombing of civilian populations in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, his engineering of Pinochet's coup d'etat against the democratically elected president of Chile, of which he observed,  "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves," or his support for Indonesia's genocidal invasion of East Timor, we are speaking of a man who has become wealthy and gained the regard of political elites, all the while escaping any accounting for his crimes.

Today, remember our fallen heroes, but also spare a moment for the victims of America's oldest and most vicious war criminal, Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger: Murders by Pinochet A-OK!

Here's the latest news on that reprehensible war criminal Henry Kissinger:

Back in 1976, when the United States had knowledge that the Pinochet regime was planning an international campaign to murder its political opponents, senior State Department officials urged him to deliver a memorandum to the Chilean government warning them against carrying out its plans.

An August 30, 1976 memoranda from Shlaudeman titled "Operation Condor," advised Kissinger: "...what we are trying to head off is a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the international status and reputation of the countries involved," including Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil.

Kissinger's response: The Secretary "has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter," stated a September 16, 1976, cable sent from Lusaka (where Kissinger was traveling) to his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman.

The next day, a massive car-bomb claimed the life of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his 26-year old American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue in Washington D.C. The bombing remains the most infamous attack of "Condor"—a collaboration between the secret police services in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and several other Latin American military dictatorships, to track down and kill opponents of their regimes.

So let's see: the coup in Argentina, murder in Chile . . . Is there any crime in the last quarter of the 20th Century he wasn't complicit in?